The Speaker is:



Georgios N. Yannakakis (Professor and Director of the Institute

of Digital Games, University of Malta, and the co-founder of modl.ai. )

Description of the talk

Abstract: Ever since the birth of the idea of artificial intelligence (AI) games have been the key enabler of AI breakthroughs including deep learning and artificial general intelligence. It is not only AI that advances through games, however; AI has been assisting games to evolve in the ways we play them, test them, design them, and understand play, interaction and creativity. As games get increasingly richer and more complex through creative AI processes, AI advances further and in turn, it advances the environments it is trained in a continuous co-(r)evolutionary loop. Video games are arguably the most important domain to develop AI for, while AI is arguably the most important technological leap forward for games. 

 

Short bio:

Biography: Georgios N. Yannakakis is a Professor and Director of the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta, and the co-founder of modl.ai. He does research at the crossroads of artificial intelligence, computational creativity, affective computing, advanced game technology, and human-computer interaction. He has published over 300 journal and conference papers (h-index 59). His research has been supported by numerous national and European grants (including a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship) and has appeared in Science Magazine and New Scientist, among other venues. He has been involved in a number of journal editorial boards; he is currently the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Games and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. He is the co-author of the Artificial Intelligence and Games textbook and the co-organiser of the Artificial Intelligence and Games summer school series.